Author Archive

The difference between a politician and a statesman is the breadth of their horizons.  But have we ever seen people with horizons as limited as our modern Congress?  Of course their ratings are low – we return their judgment of us.  They think we have no sense of deferred gratification; they think we are children – and not very bright, not very disciplined children at that.  We return the compliment.

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Appealing to a man’s strength is a coquette’s trick (& a man’s weakness), but it works.  Calvin Trillin repeats his father’s advice – “You might as well be a mensch.”  A man wants to be heroic, virtuous, strong, manly.  My daughter explained her husband’s appeal: she could count on him to take care of her.  That view of him was her appeal.  (My somewhat strident daughter stands at 5’10” and holds many fully formed opinions – she doesn’t appear dependent. But she leans on him.)   A boy becomes a man by finding his strength; however, heroism –  rescuing a community from plagues and a princess from a dragon – has taken a sentimental turn.  We’ve always found vulnerability attractive, but a pattern has emerged in which the hero rescues the most vulnerable – seeing in a child his own unformed self.  The rescue redeems. The hero’s transcendence, increasingly difficult in our ironic world, remains possible with a fragile baby or toddler.

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The consensus among Chicagoboyz seems that Obama will win; I would not argue. But the first commentor at Belmont Club’s post makes a point with which we might also find consensus (if, as one Chicagoboyz notes, also depression):

Last summer McCain said he would rather lose the nomination than lose the war and possibly this allowed some people who hadn’t before to understand the stakes involved.
 
McCain is no longer saying this because he doesn’t have to. But more than that, I think he now realizes the stakes involved require he win the election.

Fernandez analysis of McCain’s speech on Iraq & Afghanistan is thoughtful. Further commentary by Hanson is also to the point. This follows Belmont Club’s earlier analysis of Obama’s speech.

So, we’re having coffee after lunch and tune in C-span. The speaker , General Michael Rose, is at Columbia’s Saltzman’s Institute of War and Peace Studies making the argument of his new book, Washington’s War: The American War of Independence to the Iraqi Insurgency. I thought the analogy had some rather major weaknesses and found his position a bit irritating. Still, it is somewhat bracing to hear a British military man discuss our earlier conflicts. His very British point of view defines his values and positioning; they of course differ somewhat from a Midwesterner’s vision. He admires Petraeus, although the book was clearly written and argument solidified before the Petraeus strategy had developed. He remains sure, however, that we are losing, that the government there is accomplishing nothing, and that we should declare it a lost war, leave, and move on. His analogy encourages later, perhaps more cheerful, parallels as well - in the aftermath for Iraq (America’s Constitution) and for America (Britain’s great Victorian age). He repeatedly argues decisions should not be made in terms of the worst scenario - though we should have foreseen the worst scenarios when entering Iraq. Considering a blood bath might follow an early retreat is not reasonable, since bad seldom (not as much as 1 out of 10 he says) follows such conflicts.

He is a fifth generation military man. C-Span gives some biographical context: “Gen. Michael Rose (ret.) commanded the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment from 1979 to 1982. He was later commander of the UN forces in Bosnia (1994-1995). ” He strongly defends in the C-span interview as well as in his interview with Charlie Rose, the UN’s actions in Bosnia and criticizes NATO. The force in both interviews of this discussion indicates it contains points he wants to make. (I thought of Hanson’s argument that Lew Wallace did book tours for Ben Hur as much to defend his Civil War record as to sell books.) Also, he believes Tony Blair should have been impeached.

So, I turn to Chicagoboyz and ask for information, intelligence and a sense of proportion. (I did do a search of him on our site, but may have entered the search poorly. If, as seems to be happening lately, my mind is wandering and someone has talked of him, please let me know.)

For my fellow Chicagoboyz who are interested in workable business models:

With Vistas, you will learn the real story — of how we are attacking the competitive casualty gap with a paradigm-changing tactical adaptive strategy focused on paradise value optimization. Yes, there will be some changes, but our core leadership mission remains the same one established by Chairman Emeritus Osama Bin Laden when he founded Al Qaeda in his family goat shed nearly 15 years ago: to create a robust, cave-centric, best-of-breed strategic organization for global caliphate management solution services. If we all pull together as accountable subteams, we are on-track to rebuild momentum after the Q4 Infidel elections!

From Ayman al Zawahiri.  via Instapundit.

 

“They hate unpredictability. They hate anything which is in any way different. Since real art encourages you to be different, encourages you to recognize that you are different and special, and that’s in a way the essence of art. I mean, art is the perfect antidote to any sort of collectivism, so it is just the natural enemy [to totalitarianism], which is why I think the art that rose to the top in the GDR for me isn’t art at all. It is something that vaguely resembles art, but it is not at all the deep kind of experience that will help you explore your soul.” -  Writer - director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck of The Lives of Other People

This is romantic, but it’s also true.  We’ve all become a bit cynical about art’s ability to truly make us conscious, certainly we know it doesn’t always make us good.   But the paradox is that it can both connect us to others but yet also lead us to understand (and even assert) our separate selves.  We see this dual process in the growth of the Stasi official, played by Ulrich Mühe in  The Lives of Other People (Das Leben der Anderen).  The dead hand of the government twists and destroys; it grinds down and isolates him not only from others but from an understanding of his own humanity.  The director describes the tension between principle and feeling; in America we have long seen this as the tension between heart and head, ideology and humanity.  Whatever we call them, we understand the process.  

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With “Who’s Gona Fill Their Shoes” in the background, I come upon a passage apt for discussions here of ambiguity:

A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, — and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature.

Emerson - Nature - “Language”

Booknotes is at the Chicago Tribune book festival; Richard Engel’s lengthy time in Iraq is recorded in My Five Years in Iraq. (Rerun tonight after midnight.) Five years matured his sense of the war; he gives a broader and longer perspective than we see from many seasoned reporters. (His analysis of the last year supports Shannon’s argument below.) Federick Kagan’s “Voting for Commander in Chief” takes the movement over the time Engel describes and weighs it against speeches by the candidates.

He pierces the ploy of childhood games, where a “redo” might freeze us at an earlier moment in time: when, say, the Ottoman Empire included Spain or when, say, Iraq was falling apart in sectarian violence and Obama’s position seemed (somewhat) sound. If we were living in an alternate universe, this might work. For many reasons, most of us are thankful we haven’t dropped into that dimension.

This blog has repeatedly called attention to the battle over the Kennewick man. A&L links to Edward Rothstein’s review of James Cuno’s Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage, which critiques the concept of “cultural property” underlying arguments that led to bulldozing Kennewick’s burial ground. The review (and Cuno) argue that that idea has been betrayed. The framers of the doctrine, he contends, had a “universalist stance”; they “would hardly recognize cultural property in its current guise. The concept is now being narrowly applied to assert possession, not to affirm value. It is used to stake claims on objects in museums, to prevent them from being displayed and to control the international trade of antiquities.” The writer finds this change “as troubling as Mr. Cuno suggests. It has been used not just to protect but also to restrict.” Rothstein concludes “But if cultural property really did exist, the Enlightenment museum would be an example of it: an institution that evolved, almost uniquely, out of Western civilization. And the cultural property movement could be seen as a persistent attempt to undermine it. And take illicit possession.”

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“The old fierce pull of blood.” - Faulkner

Literature helps us understand human nature. Disciplines designed to do so are not always so good at it. Sometimes, indeed, they seem counterproductive. “Buried Prejudice”, an article by Siri Carpenter in Scientific American Mind (via A&L), argues that “[e]ven our basic visual perceptions are skewed toward our in-groups. Many studies have shown that people more readily remember faces of their own race than of other races.” But to Carpenter (and the researchers summarized) the tension between our understanding of truth and justice (transcendent ideals that also pulled Faulkner’s young hero, Sarty) and our feel of the tribal (which he feels mixed with “despair” and “grief”) is not the tension between feeling and thinking, the biological and the rational. Our culture has slowly developed institutions to restrain the tribal passions central to our earlier survival but detrimental to a more diverse and larger society. But, Carpenter describes a group of researchers who have found (”[u]sing a variety of sophisticated methods,” that we “unwittingly hold an astounding assortment of stereotypical beliefs and attitudes about social groups: black and white, female and male, elderly and young, gay and straight, fat and thin.” (The word “astounding” is telling.) Of course, this is not always helpful - say, in sitting on a jury - when we link (as Jesse Jackson implies he did in the catchy intro) “black” with “danger”.

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Belmont Club links to the following news story:

The British military expressed cautious optimism at the progress. Major Tom Holloway, a spokesman, said: “The Iraqi security forces have made a real difference; this is going to be a long operation by its nature. However, rule of law is returning to the streets.”

Perseverance pays off and long operations require a core optimism. But perhaps it’s all nurtured by a bit of black humor, a bit of irony. After all, WWII was won by people who invented the term SNAFU. So, here’s some merchandising - the question is, does it toughen us or lead us to despair or, well, merely, make us smile? Whatever - I want that mug. There may well be a providential order, but today things look screwed.

And, longer term, perseverance isn’t just a trait, it’s a duty. And so Wretchard follows that story with this one by Wretchard.

A&L links to a Hoover essay by Lee Harris, “Al Quaeda’s Fantasy Ideology.” His definition of this fantasy might seem to have a wider application and interest to Chicagoboyz. That he has been making these arguments and we’ve been considering them for a long while now was brought home to me when searching our site for “fantasy ideology.” This seemed more in Shannon’s line but the first “catch” was an old, angry, and interestingly prescient post by Lex inspired by a current (at that time - Sept. 22, 2003) Lee Harris essay. Here is a passage from Harris’s current essay, in which he describes how he came to understand this fantasy mindset through the arguments of a friend of his forty years ago. The friend chose a completely non-persuasive anti-war (Vietnam of course) strategy and Harris explains why:

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Much discussion today has been whether or not Obama should have been willing to sit on a board with Ayers. I can’t see why people should have to justify that kind of connection. But much discussion begs the bigger question, shifts grounds. A wife who sets up panels on which these friends can pontificate, a candidate who announces in the friend’s living room all imply a weightier connection. And the whole board thing seems a less innocuous when it gives charitable money to those who fund a board member’s election bid. And then there is money for Rashid Khalidi, but of course he needs a larger megaphone and Obama recognizes his charitable duty to provide it with other’s funds.

I’d like to point out, though admitting it’s pretty much a distinction without a difference, that Bill Ayers is a professor in an education department and not an English one. Unhappily, this reinforces Lex’s comment to my earlier post - radicals were wise to hi-jack education departments. And perhaps they were most of all wise in making sure that very little understanding of history, political theory, or even literature was rich enough to lead students to the “restlessness” of the educated and aware.

Not that, mind you, my restless students today, taking a long time to find the majesty of Sophocles and the tragedy of Oedipus, didn’t make me long for some Ritalin. (Many were, eventually, moved. I’m no expert on Sophocles or film, but I never tire of Michael Pennington, Claire Bloom, John Gielgud performing the old story. And even my restless students eventually became awed, moved by the inevitability of fate and tragedy.) I would be interested in knowing if others have a version they have enjoyed - those tapes are wearing out. And Obama himself, seem strangely fated - trying to run from the feckless nature of his grandfather, his father and yet denigrating his more dutiful grandmother, leaving his mother out of his narrative. Who is he? Well, he’s half-white, raised by whites. He’s a lot of other things, too. But for all the elegance of the fall of his suits, he doesn’t seem at ease with who he is. The anger from being on-edge leads to tensions; its effect underlies the grievances we heard today.

Just a comment to Lex’s post that got digressive:

We’re used to this inability to understand the “other”  from statists; Obama merely summarizes “What’s the Matter with Kansas” in a couple of clauses leading to his belief (like Franks) that if yahoos would see the world correctly - that is, as he does - they would understand their oppressed nature and the government/Obama as savior. They know better:  believing a government can prevent the tragedies of life (whether lung cancer or hurricanes, economic downturns or sin) leads to bitterness; believing that a leader can solve the big problems encourages misery (the people) and megalomania (the leader).

Refusal to accept limitations in our power also leads to demonizing the “other”. One of my students said she wanted life like it was under Clinton. Before 9/11? I asked.  She said, yes. If we’d just elected Gore. Yeah, right. Things should be perfect; it should be exactly as I want it. It isn’t. Someone is at fault. We’ve spent eight years of BDS; if we listen to Wright and note the subtext of Obama’s campaign, this is just the beginning. Hannity and O’Reilley can take care of themselves and aren’t exactly innocent of demonizing others; still, how many Linda Ramirez-Sliwinskis, indeed, how many like Obama’s grandmother, will be exiled from the great American family? How many will eventually be the subject of “hate time”? We have already seen Obama as unifier and it isn’t heartening.

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Twenty years [Forty] ago last week, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. The toll his family took was heavy. But the goal was - is - worthy. Bret Stephens contrasts King with Mugabe. Those who admire (mostly past tense, of course) both missed the core concept of the Civil Rights movement, of the assumptions of the will to live free. David Hackett Fischer notes how freedom and liberty are intertwined concepts in our history. Still, it is the very limits of our freedoms and liberties (the points where they touch others) that gives them shape and power, within those broad limits they empower us. If we don’t accept the limits of our freedoms - our human condition, others’ freedoms - they become perverse. Willing our death, willing other’s - that hardly changes our condition. And the most perversely revolutionary thought doesn’t throw over tradition for a universal of individual growth but rather to allow expression of one individual (one corporate) will that uses each to express that will. (Perhaps talking about Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” over and over with freshmen newly exposed to that terror makes me read the editorial pages with hyperbolic context - or maybe it is Conrad’s that is the real context.) Anyway, here is Stephens:

Maybe the question is better put this way: Why is it that “progressivism” seems so prone to nihilism? Friedrich Nietzsche, who knew something about nihilism, had an answer: “Man,” as he famously concluded in his Genealogy of Morals, “would rather will nothingness than not will.” Ultimate freedom, complete liberation, demands that man overthrow every constraint, or what Nietzsche called “a revolt against the most fundamental preconditions of life itself” – including life itself. In this scheme, nature and the natural order of things become subordinate to the mere act of willing. This is the essence of totalitarianism, a political order that recognizes no higher authority, no limits and no decencies.
 
Which brings us back to Martin Luther King Jr. In his 1958 essay “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” King described his encounter with, and rejection of, Marxism. “Since for the Communist there is no divine government,” he wrote, “no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything – force, violence, murder, lying – is a justifiable means to the ‘millennial’ end. . . . I am convinced now, as I was then, that man is an end because he is a child of God.”

“Exterminate the brutes!” may be the colonial view but it was also Stalin’s, Hitler’s and it wasn’t just the cry of Europeans in Africa but also of Cambodians in Cambodia, Rwandans in Rwanda. Wars prove less deadly than democide, for winning a battle doesn’t require the extermination of the “restless spirit” Frederick Douglass describes.

George Will looks at Austin’s campaign to keep itself weird. A useful contrast between the two flagship schools and the communities that house them might be interesting - community participation, generosity, attitude toward the “other.” Of course, analyzing levels of religious commitment, political philosophy, and applied citizenship in such minor commitments as voting and jury duty and larger ones such as enlistment would also be interesting. Last night, we watched Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace. He chooses to focus on the application of Wilberforce’s beliefs in the practical realm of politics, but the undercurrent (as certainly was true) was that the driving force that impelled him was his belief in the universal rights of man, his belief in a God and the God-given nature of those rights. But, of course, he was someone who was interested not just in believing but in acting. There is nothing more beautiful nor more useful than the practical application of the great beliefs.

Packing my boxes to move, I kept writing Austin, Nebraska - but once there, well, it felt like home for me as for so many others. Soon, Willy was setting up the first of the Dripping Springs concerts and I was reading manuscripts by the great twentieth century writers in one of the best two or three libraries in the world. Fromholz described himself as a rumor in his time and people claimed he’d run for governor (I don’t think very seriously, but who knew then). It’s cooler and dryer than much of the state and more laid back than about any place. Still, when both my kids packed up to move last year, they also felt they’d lived there long enough. I guess, in a way, so had we over twenty years before. It’s a good place to be young, but walking the dog down streets full of broken glass was getting to our daughter who lived in West campus; the rents had raised from our day but the druggies still dealt on the drag; the street people had gotten sadder (or maybe we’d just gotten older).

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Instapunk’s description of Obama reminds me of a tendency we all have - to become what others find attractive.  That can be charming.  But sometimes it is a device at once to distance ourselves from others and to ingratiate ourselves with them.  One of my son-in-law’s friends was an air force brat.  In their early years, he said, their moves every few months were harder on his brother , who actually cared about the new friends he made each year.  He said, with some bravado we expect, that moving was fine with him - it usually happened about the time people were getting fed up with him, had figured him out.  Such children learn to adjust,  learn to pick up on what others want, learn charm.

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2nd Update:  (If anyone’s reading this far down).  Tom Stoppard on ‘68. 

 The idea of the autonomy of the individual is echoed, I realise, all over the place in my writing. In The Coast of Utopia I was using 19th-century Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen’s own words about the English in the 19th century: “They don’t give asylum out of respect for the asylum seekers, but out of respect for themselves. They invented personal liberty without having any theories about it. They value liberty because it’s liberty.”

Update: Henniger on Mamet’s essay (WSJ video). 

Original post:  David Mamet

began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

He describes his conversion in the Village Voice. His picture of Bush still has elements of BDS, but he has begun to examine his experience and finds the best keys to understanding it seem to lie on the right. As some (some critical) commentors note, his work indicated he might be moving that way. (Certainly a television series about the professional & home life of a special forces unit might indicate that.) And certainly a playwright worth his salt might be interested in how character actually acts - an inadequacy that some of the more ideological playwrights of our time demonstrate rather nicely. But it was life that had forced him to look again at his beliefs.

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